A large portion of the world's population suffers from diabetes. Many of these people need to take injections of insulin to normalize the level of sugar in their bodies to prevent complications. Such complications can include kidney failure, loss of circulation, and blindness. The need to manually take injections with a syringe and the process of determining the dose for various shots can be a great inconvenience and can limit a diabetic's activities and restrict their movements. Furthermore, it can be difficult to maintain a consistent level of blood glucose because there is a practical limit to the number of injections that most patients can receive.
One solution to reduce some of the problems associated with the manual injection of insulin is an ambulatory pump that delivers insulin to the diabetic user. Such insulin pumps can provide a more consistently normal level of blood glucose, which reduces the risk of complications from diabetes. However, current pumps still have practical limits to their programming that make them cumbersome to program and that limits the potential of the pump to provide even greater control over blood glucose levels.